Curious; would people here agree that the Biblical wisdom tradition differs from the wisdom tradition of the west, which is rooted in Greek philosophy and which Paul calls Folly? If so; I’m curious what people think the key difference is between the traditions.
It seems to me we get a sense of the Biblical approach to wisdom in the story of Adam and Eve. Here we see, I think, that we are to be brought together with wisdom by God, versus approaching it on our own and through our own devices. It’s hard to get a sense of what this means in concrete or more definite terms though. For example, if one wanted to critique a philosophy, or an approach to wisdom, from a Biblical perspective, how would one go about it?
So you agree with me. But could you, by chance, articulate this “obvious difference”?
How have we, in the west, become distanced from our Hebrew heritage? How has philosophy become estranged from philosophy as it was envisioned or practiced in the Hebrew tradition / culture or from how it was encoded in their literature / sacred texts?
If there are any “Christian” philosophers out there (or philosophers or any other faith), then their naming themselves this presumes the answering of this question. So. How have you faith-based philosophers answered this question?
What does philosophy mean to a Jew, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, etc?
We, as a collective western mind, never had a Hebrew heritage.
Our western variation is of the Roman heritage.
Our introduction to what originally came out of the Hebrew culture was introduced to us largely by Roman’s populating most of Europe and spreading Christianity with it; they brought it even to Britain.
The only Hebrew Heritage that the west has are those of the Jewish ancestry that continue the traditional faith, or derivatives of it.
But if you are talking about Christianity; it’s long since been gone from Hebrew heritage; long before it became the three big Empires (England, Spain, France), it was well altered into a culture vastly different from the Hebrew culture which the Christian religion was adopted from.
It would be like having several Senators in the Republican Congress, many people are for and follow closely many of the Senators.
One of them gathers a very large single following more than any of the other single Senators, but not all of them combined.
We’ll say this Senator is some guy named Senator Robertson.
When America goes to war over in the sand-box of Iraq, a large amount of soldiers there bring with them their Republican ideas from Senator Robertson’s idea of Republican government.
The Iraqi’s begin to adopt this idea of Republican government, but they do so from the perspective of Senator Robertson’s version, as it is expressed through the soldiers that came from America.
It is referred to as Robertsonism because of it’s unique combination of concepts that differ, though related, from the standard Republican party.
So, the Iraqi’s adopt Robertsonism as a form of political thinking, and they hale Roberts for his forward thinking in political thought; he is seen as the revolutionary leader of liberation, like one thinks of Martin Luther King Jr, or Gandhi.
Fast forward five hundred years, and Robertsonism is thriving in Iraq, so much so, that Robertsonism has spread through most of the middle east all together, and has splintered into various sub-sects of Robertsonism.
There are Conservative Robertsonism adherents, and there are Liberal Robertsonism adherents; and all shades between.
Then we travel over to Turkey, where the political idea has migrated and exploded, and Turkey has risen, and risen in this alternate universe to become a sustainable super power of it’s own right and Iraq is it’s sister in societal inspiration, but Turkey takes the inspirations and has attempted to do things back to the core of what was the old idea of a Christian State, but throws Robertsonism in as natural influence.
So they are a religious state that separates political parties from their religious government agenda’s.
Then we sit there in Turkey, or perhaps one of us is in Iraq and the other is in Turkey, and we ask, “How are we different from our English Heritage?”
We never had one…the American’s came over with Republicanism as an idea expressed through Robertsonism, which is quite different from pure Republicanism firstly, and though the American’s have a heritage from England in political lineage, over in Turkey and Iraq, 500 years later…there is no trace of such an English heritage in Robertsonism.
At best, there is a trace of American Replublicanism, but very little so even at this.
American Republicanism is like Jewish Christianity, and the English is like Hebrew Judaism, and Robertsonism is like Christianity of the Romans…I think you get the picture.
I don’t think we can so easily eradicate all trace of Hebrew inheritance from the Western mind. The very fact that sacred Hebrew texts are still central to Western discourse should bear this out. We may have distanced ourselves from their wisdom, but we still pour over them in the hopes of soliciting a past wisdom.
So do you, in denying a Hebrew heritage, also deny all possibility of reconnecting to Hebrew or early Christian wisdom? Do you deny that we can identify a wisdom tradition in the Bible and compare it to what has been called wisdom in the Western tradition? That’s what I’m after.
You can’t actually connect properly with that mind-set because that perspective is completely gone.
You can come close to the ball-park if you wanted to by going to Israel today and trying to do the Amish version of Hebrew life, but that will only take you just so far.
But as for the common Christian Western culture…it’s completely disjointed from that older distant culture.
We have very little trace of anything of that culture influencing the practices of our culture, save for some basic and crude concepts that aren’t even in their proper contexts anymore.
A solid case in point is that Judaism actually at one time had a strong adherence to a duality of God and Goddess.
God had a wife, and you can even find inscriptions of people writing to her for protection along with God at the same time.
This is completely backwards from what most would think was the common Hebrew culture that birthed Christianity.
But that’s just it…they really didn’t birth it at all; Roman culture did.
Is there a trace?
Yes, absolutely.
But it’s a trace about as strong as my previous example.
It’s just so weak of a trace that it’s really impossible to say that there’s a strong relation at all.
The only relation is the top figure head of today’s Judaism and today’s Christianity.
The rest is completely disagreed on, and the mentality of approaching Religion by these two cultures and it’s role in life is absolutely different.
Western Christianities perspective on Religion’s role in life is much more akin to the Roman concept of the subject than the Hebrew’s concept of Religion.
Meanwhile, the Hebrews culture is much more related to the Islamic culture and the opposite is also true.
They share a common perspective of what Religion is in life, and how life is lived through it.
They also can related to life under related living conditions.
But as to the relationship that Christianity has to Hebrew culture of old?
You might as well relate it to Islamic culture of old.
I think we’re sidestepping one of the most important points: that Israel produced a literature which we still have access to today; a literature within which they presumably transcribed their wisdom…
Now there is certainly a cultural divide, which you are emphasizing, but the whole point of literature, and encoding in language, is to pass on and share. Are you denying this capacity of language and writing to serve as a wisdom inheritance?
Why do you read scripture then if not to inherit its wisdom? It seems to me there would be no point reading any text of the past if inheritance was impossible… Reading itself would be an excercise in futility!
So I ask again, from your many frutiful years reading scripture, what you take to be its wisdom? And, if you have an opinion, what sets this wisdom apart from what has been called wise in the west? (Why, for example, do we see in Isaiah, Paul and other places that God will reveal the so-called wisdom of the wise as folly?)
That literature isn’t what you hold in the Christian Bible.
It’s like suggesting that the story, “Go ask Alice”, is a good relative piece of literature to, “Alice in Wonderland”.
They just are dramatically different…literally.
As to this:
It’s wisdom?
Nothing.
I hold much about the wisdom of the people that took their time to write that all down and read what that means they valued in life under the conditions they lived.
This is why I really detest most of the New Testament; it is largely a hate of the human experience.
Meanwhile, most of the Torah is a celebration of being human; not anticipating it’s escape.
It speaks about the people, when you study as much as we can about how they likely lived.
And when you look at this, then that is where I find wisdom.
In the people, not just some words on a page.
I don’t care what those words really say exactly.
I am more interested in the perspective in which they were expressed.
That is truth of human marvel, and that is all that counts in my world.
We, for the most part, don’t read them as Hebrew texts. We pore over them looking for Christian messages and in doing so miss most of the wisdom of the ancient Hebrews. We look for prophecies of virgin women giving birth to messiah’s and completely miss the wisdom of a prophet telling a king that if he doesn’t get his act together some young women is going to have a son that will kick the king out.
We have a culture that insists the Hebrew Scriptures be read on our terms rather then honestly look for what the Scripture actually mean to impart.
None of what you say precludes the possibility of (re)connecting with Biblical wisdom. Christian wisdom should be in line with ancient Hebrew wisdom, such as the wisdom teachings of Solomon for example.
I think your wisdom, of a prophet telling a king to get his act together, already misses Biblical wisdom. God doesn’t want Israel to have a king. All kings do is wage war and rape women (see the life of David for example), and there’s nothing wise about that.
Before even responding, I must point out… the title of this thread is paradoxical, to put it mildly.
Yes. Most people, here in the ‘wild’ west, where I live, have very different moral standards than those derived directly from scripture (again, that’s putting it ‘mildly’). For example, the ‘Christians’ of the United States are generally {happily}ignorant of the slavery, genocide, infanticide, sadomasochism, and narcissism that goes on in the bible (as a result of the main characters’ morally bankrupt decisions, God and Jesus, who are one in the same, according to the ‘Trinity’). If these people are going to pretend to derive their moral standards from the Holy Bible, then they {at least} need to read it so that their false ‘scripture morality’ will look convincing to the objective observer (or, should I say, people like me, the unwavering skeptic).
A non sequitur…
If the paradoxical ‘wisdom’ is ‘directly from God’, then you’d have to be God in order to {rightfully} critique other philosophies (or ‘approaches to wisdom’). Assuming that you discount taking on the role of God (or answering for him because he isn’t there), I’ll go about it this way…
You’d have to use the moral ‘standards’ derived directly from scripture, but in hopes that nobody attempts to debate human trafficking with you (they sold their daughters to slavery in Exodus, for example). Anyway, ‘thou shalt not kill’ is perfect against the death penalty, if you’re using the Holy Bible. ‘Thou shalt not have any other Gods before me’ is perfect for abolishing Muslim paraphernalia (from a strictly biblical perspective, of course). And, it goes on and on…
Since I answered your question, I want to ask you something: Why would youwant to debate using a biblical perspective?
There is a lot of wisdom written down, which, as you say, is available to us. People like “Moral_Jeff” fail to see that the Prophets John the Baptist and Jesus addressed the moral bankruptcy of their political and religious leaders. The wisdom of the Bible is contained in part in the self-criticism within itself, secondly within the advice to Israel to be a light in the world by turning to their God and finding peace rather than attempting to manipulate their surroundings to induce that peace, and thirdly in the words of the New Testament, which is aiming at a completely new covenant and again, is a realm of peace.
The cultural divide is definitely there, but it is relatively easy to break through. The problem is that biblical wisdom denounces that perpetual voice within us, which is our ego, and calls on us to overcome it through trust in the Way of Christ. Through trust we come to love and its various forms of expression: joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance. If anyone says that these attributes are seldom found, then it is because of the inability to contain our ego.
Sure, certain readings of the Bible could engender this. Was it Heidegger who said religion is the end of thought? That it puts thought to rest because it provides the answer thinking was looking for? I think Heidegger is quite right if we consider religion, or the Bible, as espousing rigid dogma, as a complete system, as a totalization and perfect representation of the cosmic order… In this regard, or if this is indeed the purpose of the Bible, then it surely would put thought to an end and “Biblical wisdom” would be paradoxical as you say.
But this is to confuse what I’ve called the Greek philosophical impulse (containing reality in a system of thought) with the Biblical philosophical impulse (clinging to wisdom, God, and the rest of creation). In other words, your view presupposes and applies to the Bible precisely what the Bible is against: rigid systematization; and through this presupposition (that the Bible presents to us a complete system) you see it as the end of thought and paradoxical to speak of its wisdom (since it is the task of thought and wisdom to develop just such a system or, perhaps for skeptics like you, to put such systems in question).
Do you see what I’m saying? To get a sense of Biblical wisdom I think you need to dive into the idea of clinging, or love (recall, Biblically speaking man is to “cling to”/love woman, God, creation, etc). Clinging does not mean rigid systematizing or containing realities in a concept. Clinging means getting a hold on and holding onto, as things move and flow under our grip. Clinging, I think, is a term that should be very amenable to your skeptical mind if you’d just give it a chance, since it allows things to move and grow while also providing the contact with reality (most?) philosophers yearn for.
It isn’t very helpful, I don’t think, to consider what most ‘Christians’ think or understand of the Bible. As for the slavery, genocide, infanticide, etc, well, how are we to grow in wisdom unless we confront the most terrible aspects of reality? My only other comment in this regard is that the role of these terrible things in scripture are not so easy to grasp. They are meant to challenge us, to make us read deeper, to help us grow in wisdom. What I take to be your crude understanding, that God condones such things, is perhaps the most simplistic reading possible, and does no credit to the Bible as a challenging text. (But of course, if you presume that the Bible isn’t designed to challenge us, then your reading confirms itself!)
As I said above, you’re absolutely right: it’d be the responsibility of a Biblical philosopher to explain some terrible things, to show how scripture uses them to help us grow in wisdom, etc. But isn’t it interesting: the Bible has been confronting the horrors of humanity for millenia now, and Western philosophy has only begun to do so when forced to as a result of the Holocaust… Western philosophy is finally recognizing genocide, etc, as perhaps the most pressing philosophical issues…
I could give many answers to this. As a skeptic, you should be open to, and critical of, other positions/traditions, so you should at least understand that basic motivation. As I’ve mentioned a couple times now, the Bible confronts humanity at its nastiest, and I think that’s so important for a wisdom tradition, and something that is lacking in Western philosophy. More than anything, though, is what I take to be the basic idea of the Bible: to love/“cling to” each other, to God, to the rest of creation. The Bible has me on the level of pre-theoretical commitment, and so any theory I have or develop grows out of scripture.
Yes! My only complaint is that there is a lot going on here, and you only mention a few of the “wise” things going on in scripture. But it is definitely such things as these that compelled this post and have me searching for…a more unified? a deeper? expression of Biblical wisdom.
Interesting. I always worry though when I hear talk of containing or denouncing ourselves, as if there’s something inherently evil about us that must be suppressed or interrupted or overruled. I think it’s real easy to go astray, and there is perpetual risk of doing so, but does this mean we should posit something called ego, that is essential to self (a “perpetual voice within us”), and that must perpetually be denounced in order to stay on track? Couldn’t our going astray be, not the result of some innate tendency, but a more periodical (versus perpetual) event? This way, the self isn’t always at war with itself, as would be the case with your thinking. With your thinking, it seems to me no peace is possible (to refer to your previous comment), unless it be the peace of domination, of victory after battle, where the ego is left simmering in discontent under the powers that be…
One or the other, a neutral middle ground is here quite impossible. Either the Ego rules and the Saviour waits outside, in the darkness, or the Ego is broken like a horse, it becomes as much a subservient element as an arm, a leg, a finger on an arm or a leg. We have to remember that the Ego is what people ordinarily call “myself”. It is not merely an amalgam of petty vices, nor does it consist only of the uncompassionate things that society disapproves. The Ego is our everything, good and bad alike.
One can identify a fairly exact point where after long labour, it finally becomes possible to cast “our everything” into the abyss. This step, this decisive act (available once already on the cusp), is even called by some “the human sacrifice”. The human must be sacrificed for the god to emerge, just as formerly the animal-within had to be sacrificed for the human to become possible. And although the reference to human sacrifice is evocative enough by itself, without also imagining it being meant as physical murder, we should still be fully aware of “how far we are being asked to leap” as it were, and not neglect or suppress its inherently terrifying, sublime qualia.
The problem with biblical wisdom is that Christians and Jews, but also Christians amongst themselves are at odds about the subject. The literal has taken over, which is a little too dull in dealing with such a subject, and the mystical has been marginalised and even ridiculed to a certain degree by academic circles. Spiritual wisdom is in the whisper of 1 Kings 19:12, the still and small voice. It is in Proverbs 8:22; Psalm 90:12; Ecclesiastes 3; Isaiah 11; Micah 6:8; Mark 6:2; Romans 7:24-8:1; 1 Corinthians 12 & 13; Galatians 5: 12-26; James 3:13-18 – to name just a few texts that come to mind. Humility is the foundation of wisdom, but humility is what our ego fights.
If you could free yourself from the duality of good and evil and understand that Christ takes us back to a wisdom that was before any understanding of morality, back to an innocence that was humble and childlike, you would understand that you are just bringing your mind back into balance rather than suppressing yourself. Human beings live in an imbalance since the beginning of understanding and it has been the task of spirituality and religion to find the balance once lost – and which is lost in every lifetime in growing out of childhood. That is why this is something existential to us all – not just an academic exercise.
The simplest but by far not the easiest task in Meditation is to sit in silence and quieten the mind by concentrating on the breath. If you have some experience with this, you will understand how overbearing that voice in us is. How can we truly listen when our mind is perpetually speaking? How can we hear, when everything someone else says is overlaid by our own thoughts trying to talk them down? Our ego is very concerned that we could loose out on something and is continually protecting us against our own folly, even if it is balanced and wise and especially if it is selfless. Our ego jumps to protect us even when we are not threatened – and with the standard conditioning of our society, our ego tries to protect us even against potential problems.
The peace of Christianity is the peace of mind and soul, resting in an awareness of wholeness in God by trusting in the Way of Christ. It is freedom from all influences, including possessions and wealth, worries and fears of the ego, opinions and judgements of our peers. It is being taken into the mystical flow of spiritual life, following the inspiration of love, marvelling at the interaction of the cosmos, of all life and all seasons. That is why it is likened to a child-like spirit and recommended by Jesus.
That is a very stern method of putting the same point over as I spoke of above. In fact, it has a lot to do with how we express ourselves as to what spiritual path we follow. I do not consider myself as “broken in” like a horse, although I appreciate the metaphor. We all have to return home, be converted, transformed or changed, diverted or go different ways or part from old ways, adopt a new identity or however we choose to express the realisation of the fact that we have lost our way and finding a new direction. In general it is the conditioning of society that takes us down roads that are contrary to spiritual wisdom, and it is all done in “good faith” and care for people, but it is short sighted and very often exclusive in its intentions. The biblical understanding of good and bad is more an appropriate or non-appropriate, and much of what we are conditioned to do seems befitting if we consider ourselves continually threatened, but we all know that such a behaviour gives rise to paranoia and decisions that are anything but wise.
The peace of salvation is a heartfelt assuredness that the Way of Christ, said by Paul to be a way of faith, hope and love, is the way of life. All else leads to insecurity and conflict – even to destruction. There is no fear in love, which seems to be a fitting description of how Christ overcomes the worries of our ego and experience shows us that faith is rewarded by assurance. This is even true is the face of opposition and oppression, which often tests us with reference to what really is in our heart and what we are clinging to. This is found of course in other spiritual traditions as well, and especially Buddhism identifies our clinging to desires as the source of suffering.
I feel that there is a subtle, deadly danger constantly threatening our communications. I will express it as a pair of false polar opposites. On the one hand we have pictured the pastoral, idyllic spirituality whose great fault is that at a certain point its sweetness is all but indistinguishable for outsiders from that of a sugar pill. “Was that real? Or not? Who knows - but I already feel better.” On the other hand, we have severe asceticism, bodily and mental mutilation, orgiastic frenzy, renunciation etc., all things "so real it hurts’, indistiguishable for outsiders from madness - another extremum the dangers of which I hardly need to explain in gory detail. Here the same spirituality from before has every capacity to gradually become poisonous and demonizing. Warning to the reader! Don’t rush to conclude that moderation, of the niether-here-nor-there sort is the needed balanced answer! You will find that the the water there is lukewarm, stagnant, and the home of too many parasites!
Perhaps the desired answer comes to us as a musical hint. We know for a fact that if our composers restricted themselves to exclusive use of beautific concord, consonance after consonance, such music would become unlistenable - it simply goes nowhere. Similarly restricting the composers to dissonance only, produces the jarring effect of chaos, which “goes everywhere at once”, and never ceases to make itself ridiculous to the unaccustomed ear. It is, of course, the same false polarity of emotional communication that was already discussed. In order to generate the emotionally stirring experience of music, we must (as it were) utilize contrasts between dissonance and consonance, constantly moving and constantly stabilizing the “field” we communicate to others that, we hope, may be able to follow all of this in their own way, and make sense of it for themselves.
This is why I am a little sad, knowing that Bob will never interject something stern for me, whenever I next presume talk to the philosophical congregation in the tongue of the doves!
The “one and the Other” is really just the “one”, the ego. When you, the ego, for your own purpose, imagine an Other, a Saviur, then the ego breaks itself in two, as Paul did, and sacrifices part of itself…not so much a murder as it is a suicide. Even “suicide” here is inappropiate because the renunciation is not meant, at least for a Christian, to coincide with our destruction, the destruction of the self, the ego, but it’s survival and well being.
He or she doesn’t have to choose between him/herself and God, because that is not the choice presented. They fracture themselves between their ego, or what they continue to call the “Soul”, and their unwanted drives that hold them captive, much as Socrates would feel.
If you feel that the ego our everything, good and bad alike, then I can see why it seems to you as if they are committing a murder, a human sacrifice. But if you were more like them, like Paul perhaps, then that ego becomes a soul, the part which is never sacrificed.
Where do you experience such opposites? If you were here, you would understand that my world is one – life and death go hand in hand, I have no emotional tendency to one or another. Suffering is a challenge, but one that can be coped with, if not overcome. Sometimes I am confronted with someones real pain, or the perspective of death, which calls me to make decisions, speak with people concerned and help the person in that situation through it. Perhaps I am all to pragmatic or perhaps professional, but confronted with such severity, it is always the question as to what we shall do in the situation.
Another question is how to deal with human atrocities and mutilation – if we can “deal” with them at all. There are tears and strains at our heart, deep sadness can overcome us, even depression, but at some time we have to stand up and confront it. Is the way to confront them harm done more harm? No, I don’t believe so. Is the way to heal and raise up? Yes, I believe so. Can I do this best in an emotional turmoil? No, I don’t think so. Can I overcome my emotional turmoil? Yes, I believe I can and I believe that the best way is to achieve a certain equanimity, which is already part of my professional costume. That way, I can see and face the severity you speak of, but I can also act.
I believe that your opposites are truly false, because they don’t really exist. The “pastoral, idyllic spirituality” may seem sweet, but it often is confronted with more suffering than you are aware of. In fact, its greatest danger is of becoming automatic in the face of so many tears, for fear of becoming all too attached. However, the madness you spoke of is true madness, in German “verrückt”, meaning moved or displaced. It is primarily a kind of psychotic or schizophrenic perception of a world full of devils, demons and gargoyles, angels and ghosts. One prominent symptom is an ecstatic increase in emotional language, accompanied by a rising loudness and pitch in the voice. The only way for these people to overcome their distress is to punish themselves for their sinfulness.
If you want to polarize the discussion, be free to, but do you think anyone is helped by this? I think my lack of sternness is only in your perception and your lack of knowledge about my personal situation. The language you used is similar to that of Martin Luther in his day which was acceptable then. We speak differently of the same things today.